


Two Months

by tartanfics



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-03
Updated: 2008-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-04 08:01:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/391588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tartanfics/pseuds/tartanfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The longer they wait to speak to each other, the wider the gap becomes. AU 1981.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Months

_ _

_ 1981 _

Peter escapes. The night of the first of November, Sirius apparates to Hogsmeade, miraculously managing not to splinch himself in the process. He lands, a little unsteadily, just outside the village, down the hill from the Shrieking Shack. He sinks onto the somewhat damp grass, and sits there staring up at it, hands limp in his lap.

_Why_ isn’t he doing anything? Sirius gets things done, Sirius fixes things. But here he is, at the bottom of a hill half in the middle of nowhere, sitting dully and blankly and purposelessly. But what _can_ be done? He tears up dry brown grass, pulling it up from the roots with dirt still attached, and flings it around him. Soon there is a little ring of grass bits all around him. He buries his face in his hands, but tears don’t come.

-

The eleventh of November is a Wednesday. Sirius finds himself once again at the Shrieking Shack. This time, at least, he has a purpose. He leans his bike against the back of the house, pulls out his wand and casts a deft and almost perfect invisibility charm over it. It is one they found in a book of spells they weren’t supposed to have in their fourth year. They have since improved it. He pushes back the boards over the door, and steps inside. The stairs creak like a bad sound effect as he goes up them, hands shoved deep in his pockets. Remus doesn’t know he’s coming. But Sirius has never missed a moon—not even last month, when he and Remus barely saw each other, and barely spoke when they did. 

Remus is sitting on the bed, his back against the scratched and beaten headboard. He has his head thrown back, staring at the ceiling. He looks up when he hears the door creak open, startled. Sirius sidles into the room, skirting its edges, one of the lowers of the pack submitting to the alpha male. Remus watches him.

The only time they have seen each other since…then…was at the funeral. They looked at each other across several people’s heads, the heads of people they half know and don’t care about, and asked each other, hopelessly, how it happened. How it all went wrong.

“I didn’t expect anyone,” Remus says, and then catches himself on the tail end of the last word, realizing what he has just said.

“I’m the only one there is,” Sirius replies.

It is not an easy moon.

-

They see each other unexpectedly on the street outside the Leaky Cauldron, on the fourth of December. The air is cold. Snow warnings on the Muggle news. Remus says hello, but he doesn’t smile. 

Sirius opens his mouth to say something he means, but what comes out instead is, “Hey.” He wonders what Remus has been doing, how he’s been. He doesn’t look very healthy, and Sirius immediately feels desperately guilty. 

The longer they wait to speak to each other, the wider the gap becomes.

-

Sirius shows up on the front porch of Remus’s parents’ house on Christmas Day. It is snowing, and he’s wearing the leather jacket he bought when he was sixteen. He is also wearing, incongruously and bizarrely, a Santa Hat. He knocks, and watches the snow build up along the porch railing as he waits for an answer. The way it swoops upward a little as it meets the wall. 

Remus answers, and he is wearing an enormous, lumpy, and wonderfully ugly sweater. His toes, in maroon wool socks, peer out from the hems of his brown corduroy trousers. He looks so entirely like Remus that Sirius, unthinking, lunges forward and wraps his arms around him. Remus makes a small woofing noise as Sirius knocks the air out of him. Remus was never very good at giving hugs. Sirius hopes that, and not the two months in between, is the source of his slight awkwardness. But he wraps one arm tightly across Sirius’s back, and braces himself on the door jamb with the other one.

“You smell like wet dog,” Remus mutters into the back of Sirius’s neck. 

“Been Padfoot,” Sirius says gruffly. “He doesn’t get cold so easily.”

At that, Remus backs them up into the hall and shuts the door behind them. Sirius lets go of him, sticking his hands in the pockets of the jacket and stepping back. “Sorry,” he says.

Remus shrugs. “You weren’t the traitor,” he says without much emotion.

“You thought I was.” This hurts, but Sirius understands it. Both of them had reason to suspect the other, even if it was a reason neither of them ever thought they would even half believe in. 

“I’m sorry,” Remus says.

“Shut up,” Sirius says, and they both know what he means. They know each other so well, after eleven years, that there is no need to apologize for anything they do. It’s an ingrained habit, though.

“Come on upstairs,” Remus says, and turns and heads up the stairs, socked feet sliding on the wood. He leads the way into the bedroom Sirius remembers, Remus’s childhood bedroom. It looks the same, except that there are fewer books. Remus must have taken them with him when he moved out. Remus sits in the desk chair, and Sirius sinks onto the bed, looking at the floor.

It’s funny how Remus doesn’t question Sirius’s sudden presence here. Sirius’s suddenness, of expression, of movement, of being, is well remembered. Sirius is hard to unlearn.

“I fancy blokes,” Sirius says suddenly, looking up. 

“And?” Remus prompts, barely surprised. He isn’t much surprised by anything any more. 

Sirius goes faintly pink. “And I’m tired of lying—not even really lying, you know, just not saying everything you should say when you know you should say it. If I hadn’t done that, not said things, what might have happened differently?”

“There was nothing you could have said,” Remus says, voice soft. “They knew you weren’t the traitor.”

“But it was my idea. I might as well have been.”

“You loved them. You love Harry. They knew that.” Remus, with some traces of teenage squeamishness, feels funny using the word “love.” But it’s like Sirius is saying—they have to use the words they mean, not other words or no words at all.

Sirius nods. The white puffball on the end of his hat wobbles back and forth. 

Remus, swiftly and with a faint feeling of Christmas cheer, grins. “So, you fancy blokes, huh?” Sirius nods, looking apprehensive. “You ever fancy me?”

“I did, yeah,” Sirius says nonchalantly. “Quite a few people did. You never saw it.” 

Remus squirms in his seat, but he is half pleased. “You ever fancy James?”

“James?” Sirius squeaks. “God, no. I wanted to hit him upside the head more often than not. Good quality, in a brother.” He grimaces at the word, remembering his own brother. He usually wanted to hit him far harder than he ever hit James. He did, too, a fair few times when they were at school.

“But me?”

“You wore sweaters like that one. How could I resist?” Sirius’s humour has grown dryer, Remus notices. He is more cynical than he used to be, he laughs a little less freely, a little less like a dog, but he can’t help noticing the dark humour in life. His humour, Remus notices wryly, has become rather more like someone else’s.

“Do you still?”

Sirius bites his lip, and ducks his head. “I don’t know any more,” he says. “Too many things have changed. I don’t know _you_ any more.”

“Yes you do,” Remus says. “You’ll always know me.”

“Are you so sure about that?”

Remus grins wickedly. “Want to try it out?” He gets up off the chair, shifts in the cramped space to the bed next to Sirius. Sirius watches him, wary like a dog on guard. 

His eyes go wide when Remus kisses him. It is brief and largely chaste, and Sirius’s Santa hat leans forward and brushes the top of Remus’s head. 

“But you’re straight,” Sirius protests when Remus pulls back. 

“What do you know?” Remus says, and kisses him again, on the corner of his mouth because Remus was never the one who was good at sports—his aim’s off. 

“But—James and Lily,” Sirius protests into Remus’s mouth.

“Open minded people, aren’t they? It may take some getting used to, but I’m sure they’ll accept it.”

“Moony…”

“Life goes on, Sirius. That sounds cold, but it’s not, it’s the truth.” Sirius nods, bumping his forehead against Remus’s. He shuts his eyes, tight enough to cause spots of light against his eyelids, and kisses Moony back. 

From somewhere downstairs, the sound of Christmas music drifts up. Life goes on.


End file.
